Afterwards

‘Right. Well. You’d better not be caught fraternising with the enemy then.’

‘Darling-’

She hangs up. The phone rings again but she doesn’t answer it.

After three days of intense heat, the grass is parched and balding; the azalea flowers, once blooming up to chest-height, lie desiccated on the ground.

Sally Healey’s Portakabin door is open. Her face is shining with sweat and her hair clinging to her scalp.

Sarah knocks on the open door. Sally Healey is visibly startled to see her.

‘I know that you made a complaint about me. And I understand that. It’s fair enough. But I’m here now as Jenny’s aunt and Grace’s sister-in-law.’

Sally Healey looks shocked. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘If you want me to leave, just say so.’

Sally Healey says nothing and barely moves. The hot humid air seems to weigh us all down in the small space.

‘Shall we walk and talk?’ Sarah says, stepping out of the Portakabin.

Sally Healey waits a moment then joins Sarah outside.

There’s a faint breeze and carried on it is the distant echo of whistles and children’s voices and small feet pounding the ground.

They start walking around the large playing field and I follow.

‘You told me that your school was full on sports day,’ Sarah says. ‘And how hard you’d worked to achieve that.’

‘Yes, and we will start again; just as I said. Over the summer I’m looking at properties; we’ll be ready to start again on September the eighth just as in the school calendar and-’

‘But in September there are only a handful of new children joining reception, isn’t that right? Possibly none the year after that or the year after that?’

‘I can get those children back. I can get new children to join. I’m going to offer bursaries and scholarship schemes. Target families who wouldn’t normally go to private schools.’

But as she speaks her voice is limp, wrung out by the energy needed for such optimism.

‘Do the other investors share your confidence?’ Sarah asks.

Sally Healey is silent.

‘I imagine,’ continues Sarah, ‘they only saw the school facing financial ruin. Which would become apparent to everyone in September. Presumably the rest of the school would start to fall apart too. No one wants their child in a school that’s going down the tubes. Was it you – or someone else – who decided to get rid of the member of staff in charge of admissions? To keep things quiet.’

‘She was too old to do the job any more. I told you that.’

‘That’s bollocks, isn’t it?’

Sally Healey’s stride has become jerky. She doesn’t reply.

‘Was it you who made up the story of Elizabeth Fisher’s husband dying?’

Mrs Healey says nothing. Sarah is now leading them on towards the edge of the playing field.

‘You must have known her husband had left her, for your ploy to work.’

‘I’d heard he’d left her, yes.’

‘Though you don’t listen to gossip?’

‘A member of staff, Tilly Rogers, told me when she found out I was making Mrs Fisher redundant, in the hope that I would reconsider my decision.’

‘But instead you used that personal vulnerable information against her.’

Mrs Healey turns to Sarah. ‘I didn’t want her to contact parents and tell them about the fall in admissions.’

‘So you made sure she’d be too embarrassed to do that.’

‘We just couldn’t afford any more negativity. I’m not proud of what I did. But it was necessary.’

‘You then replaced her with an unintelligent young secretary who could be relied on not to notice that no new families were signing up.’

‘That’s not how it was.’

‘I think that’s exactly how it was.’

We’ve reached the edge of the playing field now. Through the branches of the horse-chestnuts, lining the driveway, you can just glimpse the black cadaver of a school.

‘And this?’ Sarah says. She turns to Mrs Healey, her eyes blazing. ‘Whose idea was this? ’

‘I had nothing to do with it,’ Sally Healey says. ‘Nothing! I spent years building up a school to be proud of.’

‘So was it an investor who wanted a fire?’

‘Nobody wanted a fire. Nobody!’

‘Wasn’t that why you wanted those fire precautions in place, so that the insurance would pay out?’

‘No!’

‘And no one gives a damn about Jenny and Grace. Just fucking money.’

She’s here as your sister and she can swear if she wants to.

Mrs Healey is just staring at her school.

‘I heard that some of the children have already been given places in other schools,’ she says, her voice very quiet now. ‘And who’s going to give me a job? When I allowed my school to burn down, when one of my teaching assistants is so badly hurt?’

‘A colleague of mine will interview you formally,’ Sarah says, curtly.

Tears mix with the sweat on Mrs Healey’s cheeks.

‘We were never going to come back from this, were we? Whatever I did.’

29

On her car phone Sarah tells Mohsin about the ticking financial time bomb at Sidley House. As she speaks, I remember Paul Prezzner, the Telegraph journalist, talking to Tara. ‘The point is that it’s a business. A multi-million-pound business. And it’s gone up in smoke. That’s what you should be investigating.’

Jenny had thought so too.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mohsin says when Sarah finishes. ‘We’ll get people onto it straight away. Talk to the head teacher, get the background on the investors. The whole shebang.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I leave you alone for an hour,’ he says, his voice affectionate, ‘and you create a whole new line of enquiry. New suspect. New motive.’

‘Yup.’

Adam is so close now to being cleared. And surely that will help him; surely that will mean he can talk again.

Mohsin is quiet; on speaker phone we can hear him take a couple of breaths.

‘Baker’s getting Davies to contact you about the disciplinary meeting. He wants you to come in at three today. But this may make him drop it.’

‘I doubt that, somehow. I do mind, you know, even if I don’t show it, about losing my job.’

‘It won’t come to that.’

‘It may come to much worse than that. The thing is, I’ve just got too much to worry about to really notice that I’m worrying about that too. Has Ivo left?’

‘About twenty minutes ago. He should be there by now.’

We arrive back at the hospital, but I can’t see Jenny.

I follow Sarah to ICU.